crime
Helen Hawkins
The latest incarnation of David Mitchell, TV actor, looks at first sight much like the familar one from Peep Show and Back. Not a pufflepant in sight. His only costume change for Ludwig is a pair of wire-frame spectacles. HIs role is pretty familiar too: a buttoned-down individual who culturally favours the classics over the popular, the corduroy sports coat over the tracksuit. Presumably a fan of Beethoven, he has adopted the pen-name Ludwig for his line of work; behind the name he is John Taylor, bachelor. But fate calls him to apply his skills forensically, and he joins the line Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re looking for an advertisement for how crime doesn’t pay, Joan will do very nicely. Written by Anna Symon, this six-part series is based on the memoirs of real-life jewel thief Joan Hannington, whose light-fingered accomplishments earned her notoriety back in the Eighties. Some apparently referred to her as “The Godmother”, though they don’t here.Stepping boldly and brassily into the lead role is Sophie Turner (who, once upon a time, played Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones). We first meet her when she’s living with Gary, a brutal, womanising thug who she eventually decides to leave Read more ...
James Saynor
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. Queasy marketeers have often underestimated the likely box office of mad-killer pics – from Psycho (1960) through The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and then on to Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was also seen as a bit of a gamble by its studio in 2019.The Warner Bros sequel to that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Let the train take the strain”, as the old advertising slogan urged us. The train in this six-part drama has to soak up a whole world of strain, as it’s taken over by cyber-hijackers who demand a huge ransom before they’ll consider relinquishing their technological grip.The train is called "The Heart of Britain", and it’s the night sleeper service from Glasgow to Euston. Some viewers may detect resemblances between this and Idris Elba’s Apple TV plane-drama Hijack, or (in a more rail-orientated vein) Snowpiercer, but Nightsleeper does at least have the distinction – well, kind of – of being Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral turpitude. The tale is an Americanised version of the good old country house mystery, and behind the superficial veneer of fabulous homes and expensive boats lurks a hinterland of avarice and cruel intentions.At the core of the action is best-selling novelist and matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury, played by an imperious Nicole Kidman with maximum Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Like the BBC’s documentary series The Yorkshire Ripper Files before it, the French six-part drama Sambre on BBC Four is more than a grim rerun of an extended crime spree. On trial, too, are the forces that allowed the crimes to continue – here, for an incomprehensible 30 years.Sambre is based on the journalist Alice Géraud’s 2023 book about the case. It’s a mature piece, more drama than documentary, that isn’t concerned with standard crime-mystery twists that slowly ratchet up suspense. Here the man charged with raping 56 women in northeastern France between 1988 and 2018 is clearly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks as trip over them. Masterminded by Ben Schiffer, the eight-part series is based on Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels, which are much loved by their readers.I wouldn’t bet on them feeling the same about the TV version. The plot-driving device is the arrival in Istanbul of Detective Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai from Killing Eve), who finds himself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the streaming age.There’s plenty to like about this eight-episode reincarnation, which casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role of Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who seems to have enough on his plate coping with the poisonous internal politics of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, even before he has to undergo the ordeal of being tried for an Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A number of films in recent years have added a distinctly local flavour to the folk-horror genre. Mark Jenkin was inspired by Cornish superstitions in the ghostly Enys Men and Kate Dolan’s underrated You Are Not My Mother was ripe with Irish pagan practices and folk tales. The Moor, the directorial debut of Yorkshire-native Chris Cronin, continues in this lineage of imagining local folklore through the eyes of genre cinema. Moorland is a distinctly British habitat and has been the swampy canvas we have projected fears onto for millenia. It’s the home of Grendel-like creatures, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s entirely fitting that Jake Adelstein should have a poster for All the President’s Men on the wall of his Tokyo apartment, since it was the filmic apogee of the notion of journalist as superstar. But where Alan J Pakula’s 1976 movie had Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as ace reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, knocking the bottom out of Richard Nixon’s presidency with their coverage of the Watergate scandal, Tokyo Vice tracks the intrepid efforts of expatriate American crime reporter Adelstein to expose the murderous activities of the local yakuza gangs.The series is based on the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this Rebus redux, arriving nearly 25 years after the original first series began, screenwriter Gregory Burke has reworked the character as a younger Detective Sergeant, drawing on the spirit of Rankin’s original novels but with the author’s blessing to take the character somewhere new.Richard Rankin (no relation to the writer) is an excellent choice for Rebus. Rough, tough, scruffy and not to be trusted around a bottle of whisky, he comes equipped with the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The notion of prison as a pressure cooker of human behaviour and emotions is hardly a new one, but it can provide formidable fuel for drama. It does so here in this ferociously gripping Danish series, which hails from the same production company as The Killing and The Bridge. It also boasts a forceful roster of acting talent, not least Sofie Gråbøl (aka Sarah Lund from The Killing) and David Dencik (from Chernobyl and McMafia, among other things).Both of them play prison guards at an establishment known as the House ("Huset" in Danish), where they and their fellow-warders are enmeshed in Read more ...